This disclosure relates to counting and ranking entity instances, such as counting and ranking webpage requests.
Enterprise systems often are required to identify the top N entity instance types accessed from a large collection of entities at regular intervals of time. Entity instance types may correspond to unique files, webpages, domains and other network properties available to users of the enterprise system. One common request is to identify the top N webpages from a log of a large collection of web page accesses at specific intervals of time.
Existing methods require storage of the web accesses and maintaining the counts of all the web accesses. This approach requires large amount of memory for storing the counts and significant processing time for generating reports ranking the web accesses based on the stored counts. In addition, this approach does not provide web access ranking in real time.